Vojislav Bubiša Simić, a citizen of Belgrade by birth, mentality and upbringing. In his 96 years, he carries more than 70 years of symbiosis and love for music. For more than three decades, he was the conductor of the RTV Belgrade Jazz Orchestra. Curious, intuitive, his own, he is the man to whom Tito "justified" on Youth Day that he really likes jazz, and who scared the famous Marshal Tolbukhin at the celebration of the third anniversary of the liberation of Belgrade because before his official address he played a Soviet choral composition instead Stalingrad mistakenly let the children's choir whistle Marjane, Marjane. Isn't jazz precisely improvisation without hesitation, but respecting the rules?
GROWING UP
Bubiša Simić grew up in a respectable family of lawyers, in which the Second World War passed by, after which he saw all the painful, but also bright days. Candied fruit in the "Veljković" delicatessen, bread, lard and allspice on street corners, the "Glumac" pastry shop in Zemun with the famous ice cream with waffles in a cup, Tašmajdan, football and running around with friends, teenage parties where he played with his friends first compositions as a school orchestra. Those were the days.
His mother, like all bourgeois girls of that time, studied the piano and the French language, so Bubiša lived with her pianist from birth. He started to play the piano at twelve, so his mother quickly got him a teacher, and within a few hours he started playing Chopin's easier waltzes, and after two years, he received a valuable brand new piano from his grandmother. Bluthner. The beautiful and carefree time lasted until the April bombs in 1941, which the Germans unwillingly scattered around Belgrade. One bomb demolished half of their house at 39 Majke Jevrosime, the very one where the piano was located. The English mechanics still withstood the German bombs, the tone was intact despite the broken top cover and legs. Fate said yes to music.
After the allied bombing in 1944 and after the sirens had just gone off, an ensemble was formed which had a scheduled live broadcast on Radio Belgrade. You were not present for three members, someone took the drum, bass and guitar from the studio. The genetic musical code worked instantly, and since they came on bicycles, they used bicycle pumps for rhythm. It sounded like a drum playing with whisks on a drum, and the pump was promoted as a musical instrument for the first time. Genius was already there, preparing to write the brightest pages of our jazz history.
for an enlarged image, right click and »view image«MEMORIES: With Louis Armstrong at the residence of the US ambassador in Belgrade
DISCOVERING JAZZ
When the Americans liberated Paris in August of the same year, they set up the radio station "AFN", which, in addition to short news, broadcast mostly jazz. Every day at 13 pm the show would start with a Tom Dorsey hit On the Sunny Side of the Street. At that time, a screening of an American film was held in the Avala cinema in Belgrade Serenade, which was peppered with Glenn Miller's jazz – an almost surreal scene after four years of occupation.
In 1946, he and his company decided to form a big band Dynamo which they had been dreaming about for a long time, with Bubiš as conductor and arranger. Except for sheet music from pre-war orchestras, the largest part was given to them by the American Reading Room. They played in the garden of the National Front, at the DIF, the basketball courts at Kalemegdan, which was then Hollywood with American jazz in communist Belgrade. Citizen youth came, basketball players Šaper, Kalember, Nebojša Popović, state boxing champions, mangupis, the most beautiful girls. In 1948, half of the band, including Simić, went to the Radio Belgrade Entertainment Orchestra.
The Jazz Orchestra of Radio Belgrade has traveled the world. On the tour, the German Democratic Republic heard the singing numbers of Lola Novaković and Ivo Robić, and the jazz repertoire of our and American composers. Budapest, a three-week tour in Poland, a gig at the Wawel Castle in Poland, Italy, Prague and the Lucerne Baroque Hall are some of the places they have conquered. A tour of the USSR followed in 1961, right around the time German Titov flew into space from Baikonur. In the resort of Sukhumi on the Black Sea, they played the blues in his honor, and it's Baysey's Blues Backstage was baptized in Blues for German Titov.
At the popular music festival in Rio de Janeiro, Bubiša Simić represented Yugoslavia with his own composition. Then he met world jazz greats Henry Mancini, David Rexin, Johnny Mandel, guitarist Buddy Powell, as well as Frank Sinatra's arranger Nelson Riddle. They were surprised that such good jazz was played in Yugoslavia.
From 1975 to 1991, the RTB orchestra played during the winter, once a week, at the Hotel Metropol - "Music of my youth - a dance for the old crazy world". At the end they always played a set of Glenn Miller music. One evening, a middle-aged American sang Miller's entire repertoire with them. When the set ended, Vojislav approached him to ask him how he knew the repertoire so well. It turned out that the gentleman was employed by the airline company "McDonald Douglas" and that he was often on the crew of the plane that flew the Glenn Miller Orchestra on tours of America. Because of our orchestra, he came all the way from Bucharest.
DUKE ELLINGTON, COUNT BAYZEE, JOSEPHINE BAKER, DISNEY GILLESPEE
Bubiša Simić heard Duke Ellington for the first time in 1938 in Vrnjačka Banja. When he found out that he was coming to Belgrade, he decided to give him a special welcome. He learned with the orchestra Take the Train, an Ellington trademark. They went to the airport and settled in the hall near the customs exit. At the moment when Duke entered the hall, the composition started. The Americans were delighted. That evening, Duke Ellington had two concerts in the House of Unions, according to many - the best jazz concert ever in Serbia. When he was leaving, at the airport, he gave Simić the concert program with a dedication To Airport Orchestra, Good luck, thinking he was a member of the airport orchestra. However, when Bubiša Simić met the members of Duke's orchestra two years later in New York at the Newport Festival, when asked if they remembered him, he received a prompt answer - "Certainly, you greeted us at the Belgrade airport."
His fascination with Count Basie dates back to 1939, when he received his records from his father. He wrote a composition at the festival in Juan le Pen in the XNUMXs Greetings to Count Basie, for which he received the first prize, and in the fall of 1965, he presented the scores of the composition to Basie when he met him in Munich.
As director of the Belgrade Spring festival in 1975, he had the honor of hosting Basie and his orchestra. They met again in 1982 in Las Vegas, when Simić quite by chance saw a poster on the door of the "Ceasars Palace" hotel - "Tonight Count Basie Orchestra and Sammy Davis Jr." After the concert, he wanted to see an old acquaintance. Basie's son asked him not to stay because he is very old and sick. He entered the dressing room and was startled, in a wheelchair sat a haggard old man with a wandering eye. He barely signed an autograph with a trembling hand. It was obvious that Basie was his old self only when he played and that jazz brought him back to life. He died a year after that.
The famous Josephine Baker, star of the Parisian variety shows "Moulin Rouge" and "Folly Berger", came to Belgrade at the age of 62. Although in her seventh decade, she was full of life and strength, with a ringing voice, charm, and outstanding physical condition.
Bubiša prepared the program beforehand, and it was not at all easy for the orchestra to follow her, because the music is connected with her movements. Baker, the epitome of perfectionism, was very nervous, rather difficult-tempered. She was especially annoyed by the Balkan casualness and the fact that rehearsals never started on time after the break. Nevertheless, the concert in Belgrade was a great success. The next day, Josephine went to the concert in Skopje by train, which crashed near Leskovac, and she sent a telegram to the orchestra to be ready for the rehearsal. When she finally arrived she asked, "Why aren't you on stage?" And this concert went great. They said goodbye with kisses and champagne. He remembered her words: "You, (she meant the Serbs) are always tired." Maybe she was right, Bubiša recalled.
After a concert with Dizzy Gillespie in 1956 in Belgrade, Bubiša Simić and the crew were invited to a jam session at a club in Čika Ljubina Street. They brought some old instruments, on which the American musicians fell with laughter - especially the saxophone whose holes were stuffed with bread. However, when they started playing, the guests were delighted with their performance.
In the tenth decade of his life, Bubiša Simić is still living his dreams, now more through memories, but also through the ardor that awakens in him when he realizes how many people, generations, he inspired to feed their souls in his beloved jazz.
